This research has attempted, through a qualitative study of 60 Overseas Chinese Christian entrepreneurs in China, to shed light on three salient issues regarding Christianity and business life in China. First, it shows how Christian faith is taken seriously by those entrepreneurs and also shows the ways in which this faith influences their daily business practices in a very secular society such as China in an ethical and rational direction. The study implies that Christianity has been and can be one possible source and actor of a new business morality in China. Second, unlike the typical assumption that links Overseas Chinese businesspeople with Neo-Confucian entrepreneurs, this research joins other studies in demonstrating the heterogeneity of the Overseas Chinese community. It shows that there is a significant and growing number of Christians among Overseas Chinese who are actively involved in Christian networking and pursuing management strategies based on Christian principles. Instead of shying away from revealing their faith, they are keen to integrate their faith into their business practices. Although it is difficult to disentangle totally Confucian values from Christian values with these businesspeople, the conduct and rationales behind their choices seem to have become more an implementation of certain interpretations of Christian values than a straightforward result of Confucian values. Third, the case studies on Overseas Chinese businesswomen imply that women are not only active in the church, as many have noticed, but are also steadily involved in entrepreneurship.

In the work of the authors under consideration here, cinematic depictions and allusions are not the result of what Robert Stam calls ‘dichotomous thinking’, a presumed bitter rivalry between literature and film in which both forms are presented in their rival media as the lesser opponent in a Darwinian death struggle. Likewise, the authors operate under a clear distinction between national film industries and national cinema, a differentiation, according to Jigna Desai, in which ‘the latter is thought to represent the nation, which increasingly is seen as threatened from the inside (minorities) and from the outside by the hegemony of Hollywood…’ and ‘the former may be considered a commercial, profit-seeking enterprise that often is protected as a national industry against other international producers of similar commodities’. As a result of their goals for commercial appeal and international dissemination, national film industries echo Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's discussion of the communications infrastructure that produces the conditions and terms of government for the entity they deem the empire of corporate imperialism. As Hardt and Negri write:

Created by Oxonians, the Dark Blue noticed the press across the globe.

1. Lang, Andrew. “Théophile Gautier.” 1 (1871): 26–35.

Biography of Gautier, the French poet, critic, and journalist, noted his late entry into journalism but only specified his work for the Chronique de Paris, edited by Honoré de Balzac.

2. “The Life and Times of Henry, Lord Brougham, Written by Himself.” 1 (1871): 253–54.

Credited Brougham for much of the success of the early Edinburgh Review.

3. Rawlins, W. D. “The ‘Tatler in Cambridge.’” 1 (1871): 628–29.

Welcomed a new triweekly quarto that had “literary merit.”

4. [Quin, W. T. W., 4th] Earl Dunraven. “Personal Reminiscences of a War Correspondent at Versailles.” 2 (1871–72): 549–56, 715–29.

Recalled a sojourn at Versailles, during the Franco-Prussian War, when “anxious correspondents endeavoured to weave ‘copy’ from the casual observations of diplomatic lips.” The careful correspondent, “who writes contemporaneous history,” helped to separate truth from error, so it was “a very great evil that the public should expect from war correspondents a never-failing supply of interesting letters, full of ghostly horrors or picturesque scenes, and resonant with the din of battle.” Correspondents should provide the facts impartially, and a war editor, which every paper needed, should write the stories.

5. “Oxford Chit-Chat.” 3 (1872): 474–77.

Noticed among Oxford weeklies the informative Oxford Times on Friday and the Oxford Guardian on Wednesday. Aside that “street arabs” daily pressured people to buy London's Echo.

In February 1935 Kaganovich was appointed head of the People's Commissariat of Ways of Communications (NKPS) – the ministry that had charge of the rail transport system. His role in the central party apparatus, the Orgburo and Secretariat was reduced, and he lost the leadership of the Moscow party organization. He was diverted from party work, where he had made his reputation, into economic management, where he had little experience. They railways were the Achilles heel of the Soviet system, and in 1930–33 they had experienced an acute crisis. The railways were the main mode of transport in the USSR, carrying some 80 per cent of all freight. They were also vital for the defence of the country. After the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and the rise of Hitler to power in 1933, the Soviet leadership feared the prospect of war in the East and in the West. The railways were a major consumer of the products of heavy industry, and relations between NKPS and Vesenkha/NKTyazhprom were plagued by conflict. Kaganovich's career in this period casts important light on the internal debates of the Stalinist leadership with regard to economic policy.

The Soviet economy in 1934–36 experienced a stable period of development, what Naum Jazny referred to as ‘the three good years’. It marked an interlude between the famine and the Great Terror. Notwithstanding the consolidation of Stalin's dictatorial power as party leader, the Soviet political regime retained some of the characteristics of a polycratic system.

From 1930 to 1935 Kaganovich was at the height of his power as Stalin's deputy and a full member of the Politburo. As party deputy he balanced Molotov as chairman of Sovnarkom. The stresses associated with the ‘revolution from above’ brought profound changes in the organization of the work of the party and in its ideology. Kaganovich played a pivotal role in strengthening the party apparatus, which assumed a key role in setting and enforcing policy. The central party apparatus and Sovnarkom became the main directing centres of the developmental dictatorship of the command administrative economy. They set priorities, coordinated subordinate institutions and resolved conflicts. The party assumed the key role in mobilizing support behind this programme and in training cadres to staff the state and economic institutions. The regime became increasingly detached from society. The breakneck pace of industrialization precipitated a deepening crisis in agriculture that resulted in the famine of 1932–33.

The nature of the Soviet political leadership underwent a marked change as the defeat of the Rightists saw the consolidation of the power of the Stalin group. The former Trotskyist V. N. Maksimovsky clearly believed that Stalin already had dictatorial power by 1929. He stressed the historic role of personal dictatorship as a means of resolving difficult issues, but drew a sharp distinction between dictatorship and tyranny and warned of the dangers of dictatorship turning into tyranny.

Up to 1936 Stalin and his deputies were bound together by shared ideology, common experiences and aspiration. Stalin was not omnipotent or omniscient and had to depend on his lieutenants, but during the Great Terror he compelled his deputies to carry out his will. Collective responsibility, but not collective decision making, operated in the most binding way. This marked a profound transformation of the Soviet party-state. This involved huge institutional changes, and the transition of a system of dictatorship into something qualitatively different, which we might label a despotism or tyranny. Terror became a permanent part of the system of rule. This changed Stalin's relations with his deputies and wrought a huge change in the mental and moral outlook of these people. Kaganovich's biography provides an insight into this transformation. It offers an insight into the way Stalin's deputies become his accomplices in mass murder, how they rationalized their actions, and how they reflected on their role in these events, insofar as they were capable of undertaking such reflective assessment and possessed sufficient self-knowledge to do this.

The Culture of Stalinism

The ‘revolution from above’ profoundly changed the Soviet state and its relations with society. It saw the consolidation of the Stalin's group's power. The culture of Bolshevism underwent a profound change whilst the cultic, messianic, quasi-religious aspect of the Stalinist political system became pronounced. The state came to rely ever more on coercion to maintain its position and enforce its policies. Legal norms and restraints were swept aside.

Kaganovich emerged from the Civil War as one of the new elite of proletarian, revolutionary administrators who were to have a decisive influence in shaping the political development of the state in the coming era. The ending of the Civil War left the new Bolshevik regime in a state of disorientation. A series of crises – the Kronstadt rebellion, the strike movement, and the peasants' revolts – had compelled a démarche, the abandonment of War Communism and the introduction of the New Economic Policy (NEP). This was widely resented by party activists as a capitulation to capitalism. The Bolshevik regime lacked legitimacy and its social base was seriously eroded. The failure of the European revolution, forced the Soviet regime to come to terms with the realities of capitalist encirclement. The party strove to consolidate its power by outlawing other parties and by imposing as ban on factions within the Bolshevik party itself. The one-party state rested on the administrative might and coercive capacity of the party, the state apparatus, the Cheka and the Red Army.

The new regime sought to legitimize itself as the embodiment of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. But this was a party that in a sense substituted itself for a declassed proletariat. It bolstered its self-legitimation through its claim to embody a wider good, and through profession of a consequentialist morality. The ideals of communism were left in suspension as the regime orientated itself to a new task, assuming the role of a developmental dictatorship.

Addressing the lower social ranks, Chambers's Journal, the product of brothers William and Robert Chambers, publicized the press extensively. Significant in this output were a pioneer history of newspapers and an ongoing concern about country gazettes.

1. Chambers, William. “The Editor's Address to His Readers.” 1 (1832–33): 1–2.

Promised that Chambers's would provide knowledge and amusement but not news because of the stamp duty.

2. “Popular Information on Literature.” 1 (1832–33): 99–100, 122, 220.

Depicted Robert Southey as a hardworking, wide-ranging author in the Quarterly Review and William Gifford and J. G. Lockhart as its editors who ensured its quality criticism in contrast to Thomas Campbell, a less energetic editor of the New Monthly Magazine. In the eighteenth century, distinguished writers established periodicals that generated little interest; in the nineteenth, anonymity produced “literary hypocrisy” but opened doors to tyros.

3. “Printing and Stereotyping.” 1 (1832–33): 278.

Explained that Chambers's use of stereotyping kept costs down.

4. [Chambers, William]. “Chambers's Edinburgh Journal.” 2 (1833–34): 1–2.

Assessment of Chambers's first year listed introduction of stereotyping; issuance in the United States and some colonies; employment of seven writers with “practice and experience in letters” to complement borrowed material; rejection of illustrations in order to appeal to “understanding,” not the “senses,” or present the “endless, meaningless flippancy” of many periodicals. Condemned the “desperate trash” of unstamped political tribunes while Chambers's commercial success legitimated its moral goal of education.

It is true that Marxism today is in crisis; but it is not dead or irrelevant, as its opponents try to argue. This crisis is being explained primarily with reference to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the failure of socialism to outwit capitalism as a world system. The present essay, however, tries to look at this question from a somewhat different angle. It tries to argue that the crisis of Marxism has to be primarily explained as an internal one. The end of the USSR has, of course, added a new dimension to it. To be more exact, the essay seeks to examine how the inner crisis of Marxism has been actually precipitated by the distortions it has suffered in the name of official or authentic interpretation and to explore new clues towards an alternative understanding of Marxism's revolutionary spirit at the dawn of the twenty-first century. It is an irony of history that the development of Marxism in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, when it had not yet attained any official status, took place in dark times, in the periods of worst reaction and counterrevolution, while the internal crisis of Marxism, which constituted its own dark hour, was contingent and avoidable and took shape in a period marked by the victory of socialist revolution in Russia.

In October 1917 the Bolsheviks, in coalition with the Left SRs, established their government, the Council of People's Commissars (Sovnarkom). The new regime offered unprecedented opportunities for advancement to a wide cohort of party members and sympathizers. The consolidation of the Soviet state became the overriding priority of the regime. The winter of 1917–18 witnessed a collapse of industrial production and acute problems of food supply in the urban centres. The dispersal of the Constituent Assembly in January 1918 was perceived, even by some Bolsheviks, as an illegal usurpation of power. The advancing German armies threatened to overthrow the Soviet regime. By the summer of 1918 the first phase of the Civil War had begun, with the White Armies of Kolchak, Denikin, Yudenich and Wrangel in league with the interventionist forces from Britain, France, America and Japan. The failure of the European revolution left the Russian revolutionary government beleaguered and isolated. In this period Kaganovich underwent a baptism of fire into the realities of revolutionary politics and into the practicalities of realpolitik in major battle fronts such as Nizhnyi Novgorod, Voronezh and Turkestan.

Nizhnyi Novgorod

In 1918 Kaganovich was sent by the Central Committee to Nizhnyi Novgorod initially as a party agitator. On 26 May the province party committee heard a report on behalf of the Central Committee from N. A. Semashko, who had close links with the city, and on his recommendation the committee co-opted Kaganovich and one other as members.

Introduction

During the past half century, Indonesia has experienced pronounced swings in its development policies, priorities, processes, and outcomes, on a scale matched by few other developing countries. For these reasons, economic historians tend to characterize its development as one of missed opportunities (Booth 1998, Dick et al. 2002). The key dates are March 1966, signaling the transition from Sukarno to Suharto, and May 1998, when Suharto stepped down in the face of widespread public protests and the country abruptly swung from authoritarian to democratic rule.

Thus, from 1960 to 2010 there were three distinct periods. The first of these, the remaining years of the ”Guided Economy,” is not covered in any detail in this volume, but it is useful to be cognizant of them. They were characterized by economic stagnation, hyperinflation, and growing political instability. The country was increasingly isolated regionally and internationally. The government withdrew from most international organizations, vowed to crush the newly formed state of Malaysia, and saw its priorities increasingly aligned to the so-called “Beijing–Pyongyang–Ha Noi–Phnom Penh–Jakarta axis” and other “new emerging forces.” The leading economic development textbook of the period characterized the country as a “chronic economic dropout,” and saw little prospect for economic development (Higgins 1968). Gunnar Myrdal's (1968) Asian Drama off ered a similarly gloomy prognosis. The country's development plan for the period 1960–1968 had 1,945 paragraphs, 17 chapters, and 8 volumes to symbolize the country's independence date.

Intended as recreational, the Cornhill under W. M. Thackeray and his editorial descendants showcased the impact of journalism on public opinion and the characteristics of journalists.

1. [Hunt, Thornton]. “A Man of Letters of the Last Generation.” 1 (1860): 85–95.

Honored Leigh Hunt who “established a reputation for cultivation, consistency, taste, and independence and originated a style of contemporary criticism unknown to the newspaper press.” His Examiner set the “style, tone, and sentiment for the press,” a “cultivated style, elegant tone, and independent sentiment.” Asides on his Reflector and Indicator.

2. [Sala, George Augustus]. “William Hogarth: Painter, Engraver, Philosopher.” 1 (1860): 177–93, 264–82, 417–37, 561–81, 716–35; 2 (1860): 97–112, 225–41, 354–69, 438–61.

Subtitled “Essays on the Man, the Work, and the Time,” Sala's essay connected publisher William Hone to the eighteenth-century Grub-street Journal, Daily Courant, and London Gazette; Theodore Hook's “scurrilous” writing to John Bull; and George Canning's jokes to the Anti-Jacobin.

3. [Merivale, Herman]. “A Few Words on Junius and Macaulay.” 1 (1860): 257–63. Focused on T. B. Macaulay's interest in identifying Junius.

4. [Thackeray, W. M.]. “The Four Georges: Sketches of Manners, Morals, Court and Town Life.” 2 (1860): 1–20, 175–91, 257–77, 385–406.

Cited the Tatler and Spectator as reflecting eighteenth-century “town life.” Aside on the Royal New York Gazette in 1778.

5. [Thackeray, W. M.]. “Thorns in the Cushion.” 2 (1860): 122–28.

Mused about letters to a periodical editor concerning submissions.

China has in recent years witnessed the rapid growth of religion in general and Christianity in particular. A great number of young, educated and well-off Chinese, including entrepreneurs, have declared their new faith in the Christian God. Research has also shown that there are a growing number of “Christian” companies, ones that declare their active pursuit of combining Biblical principles with business activities, emerging in cities such as Wenzhou and Shanghai (Chen and Huang 2004). It seems for more and more people in modern China, economic success, hard work and Biblical values are societal components capable of existing together in harmony. This chapter goes into detail about the worldviews of Overseas Chinese Christian businesspeople, exploring the broader attitudes and values inherent in their religious ethos which induce and influence their economic motives and activities.

Religious and Entrepreneurial Spirit of Overseas Chinese Christian Entrepreneurs in Shanghai

There are inevitably different views among Christians, as we shall see later, but there remain certain values which are manifestly seen among them. In order to better understand the following chapters on Christian business organizations, religious networks as well as Christian women's business performances, it is necessary to first delineate the underlying values and economic motivations of those Overseas Chinese Christian entrepreneurs whom I interviewed.